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People respond to the urgency of the need. If the need is severe and urgent — it’s bad right now! something’s got to happen right now! — then we’ll drop everything to get involved.

When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, we immediately mobilized to help from way up here in Amarillo. We bought hundreds of Home Depot buckets and filled them with cleaning supplies. We rented trucks and filled them with food and bottled water. Men and women volunteered to drive those trucks ten-hours one-way to deliver the help. People drove their boats in from Georgia and Kansas to help save stranded flood victims.

The morning after that horrific mass-shooting in Las Vegas last year, thousands of people lined up for half-a-mile to donate blood. When we see the need as urgent, we always respond.

In case you need reminding: the need for people to hear the Good News today is urgent.

We live in a lost and dying world. It’s broken. This past week two people in this country were shot and killed because of their skin color, fourteen people were targeted with bombs because of their political beliefs, and eleven people were murdered for their religious practices. People are broken and desperate. The systems are broken and failing. People need the salvation of God in Christ, they need to hear the Good News!

And we don’t always know what to do. We can’t fix everything. We can’t solve everything. We might even lose everything trying. But the Church always tries. The Church is on a mission. We stand and walk alongside the crushed and the oppressed. We stand with our Lord Jesus Christ and we love the broken and we proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God!

Say something to somebody today. Remind them that God is on his throne and that Jesus came to live and die and be raised again so all this can be fixed. God is solving all this. And he’s doing it with love and forgiveness, with grace and mercy, with kindness. It’s happening. It’s Good News. And the need for us to proclaim it is urgent.